Putin:Pig or Patriot? you make the call

[Julio Pino <jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1.New York Times
August 31, 2000
Wary of Lingering Violence, Chechen
          Refugees Are Afraid to Return Home

          By PATRICK E. TYLER

               ARABULAK, Russia --
               An August thunderstorm
          had just shredded the roof and
          walls of Raisa Gotsayeva's
          canvas tent, and she was airing
          out the bedding and washing
          the floorboards when a visitor
          came across her dirt threshold
          to inquire about conditions in
          the sea of tents here on the
          border with Chechnya.

          Set on the arid plain that
          sweeps up toward the
          Caucasus Mountains, barely
          visible in the distance, this
          makeshift camp in Ingushetia,
          which resembles an army
          bivouac, has taken the name
          Sputnik.

          "When I went to tell the
          authorities here that our tents
          are leaking, they simply replied,
          'Why don't you go home?"' she
          said, with a ring of indignation in
          her voice.

          "There is no other place I would rather go than home," said
Gotsayeva,
          who fled Chechnya last October after Russian rockets destroyed the
          central market in Grozny, the capital. She had been selling
clothes there
          when the rockets hit, killing 140 people.

          "I would go with great pleasure," she said. "I would go tomorrow,
but my
          house is destroyed, there is no work there, and every night there is
          shooting and they detain all the young men. If you have a beard,
they say
          you are a rebel. If you have a cut or a scar, they say you are a
rebel.

2. Covert Action Quarterly
Spring/Summer 2000 #69
              Chechnya: More Blood for Oil
              by Karen Talbot

              Media analysts and U.S. officials have been nervously
              trying to assess the "bewildering" policies of Russia?s
              Acting President Vladimir Putin, especially his actions in
              Chechnya. As the Russian elections approach in which
              Putin is favored to win the presidency, he increasingly is
              being dubbed as a nationalist even though he claims to
              be defending the territorial integrity and economic base
              of Russia in the face of escalating incursions on the part
              of the U.S. and other western countries. That there are
              grounds for these concerns on the part of the Russians
              is confirmed by numerous statements and articles in the
              western press such as the following one by William
              Pfaff: "The United States also is intervening in the
              Caspian region to establish an American-dominated oil
              pipeline route across Azerbaijan and Georgia, cutting out
              Russia, which is linked to a larger effort to displace
              Russian influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia."